factors to consider - the walsh...

11 Factors That Affect the Cost of a New Website 2

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Factors to Consider:

Introduction 3

Renovation VS starting from scratch 7

Blogs 8

Content Management Systems 9

Key Messages of Your Website 10

Do You Need New Content? 11

Graphics 12

“Responsive” Websites 13

Video 14

Social Media 15

eCommerce 16

Technical Issues 17

Conclusions 18

About the Author

Clayton Donnell is a published author and military historian. He has written four books for Osprey Publishing, one for Pen & Sword and is working on a future book for the latter. As a hobby, Clayton has been developing, programming, and maintaining websites for the Walsh Group for 11 years. Recently he became COS certified for Hubspot. He knows almost everything technical about websites.

He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1999.


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Overview

Your boss asks you to call around to see what it costs to build a website. He wants to know if it will cost $500? $1,000? $5,000? $20,000? If you get an immediate response of $500 it might sound great at first but that type of service may not be what you want and could give you major headaches down the road.

Here at The Walsh Group we are asked this question quite often and it’s not an easy question to answer. Someone will call and say they saw our sign along the road that says we create websites. Yes, we do that. They tell us that they need a new website and then inevitably they ask what it will cost. Based on our experience the answer is difficult to give because it depends on a few factors.

Avoid a tragedy >>>>


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The Great Tragedy In 1970 a film entitled “Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came” was released, starring Brian Keith and Tony Curtis. Something of an anti-war film, nevertheless it reminded me of an important factor that can influence a website’s cost:

“Suppose You Build a Website and Nobody Visits?” That, to us, is the greatest tragedy of all. It would be like taking a beautiful painting by a famous painter of a Utopian landscape and hanging it in the back of the attic. In a nutshell, you can get a website for $500 but...

Will it cause the visitor to immediately pick up the phone and call you?

Will the visitor even understand who you are and what you offer?

The trouble is - you can get a website for $20,000 that has the same results. To prevent your site from slipping into (or never even departing from) oblivion, you should consider taking the time to find a marketing advisor who will learn about your company, your competitors, your goals and objectives, and help you craft a message and a brand that instantly tells a visitor why they have arrived at your home page, how and if you can solve their pains, and what they need to do next.

A word about perception >>>>


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What do your customers think of you? You get what you pay for If you search Google for “website costs” you get an entire range of results from sites that give you a price range for developing a website, to blog articles on what a website should cost, or why it could cost what it does (and there are some excellent articles). If you are website price shopping in the bargain basement you will pay much less but you will get what you pay for. It’s easy to walk into a car dealer and say you want a new car. Will they say, “Okay, here’s the keys, your new (mystery) car is parked in slot 17; go pay the finance person and good luck.” Wouldn’t you prefer to have the opportunity to tell the salesperson your vehicular needs first? If you want a kitchen renovation, will you write a check for the lowest estimate and come back in a month and see what you got? Of course not! Hopefully the sales person or contractor will ask you a few important questions first. When you go website shopping for the cheapest price you more than likely won’t end up with what you thought you wanted and you could end up losing a lot more money for your business than the cost of a car or a new kitchen. If you have a small business with a limited income, an inexpensive website is fine. However, if you are selling quality services or products you need a website that reflects quality and professionalism.


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Should we develop a brand new website (from scratch), or redesign an existing site?

Sometimes it’s easier to start over with a clean slate than to make changes to an existing site, especially if you’re trying to improve or fix what was done in the beginning. On the surface things may look OK but underneath it could be a mess of web code band aids and duct tape that no one can see but is affecting the way your website performs. Make sure you have an experienced developer who knows how to work with whatever programming language was used to build your site, such as HTML, PHP, ASP, etc. If the site was built in HTML (the most common website language used), then it’s relatively simple to change the way it looks without starting over. Many sites are built using databases (WordPress uses PHP). In other words, the elements you see on the page are pulled from a database. This can be difficult to makes changes to. “Should we start over or just work with what we have?” This all depends but it’s an important decision to make up front. Make sure the proper research is done early so you don’t have to change tactics half way down the road. Determine objectives If you are going to start from scratch make sure you choose the right platform for the job. Determine the objectives of the website and what you need it to do for you before choosing the $100 template from cheapwebsites.com. Remember the primary tenet - first they need to find you - and the $100 template doesn’t include that. Some of the most popular website template platforms are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, but there are also a bunch of others.


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Do you need a blog page?

As you can see, in the new age of Inbound Marketing, blogging is a very important aspect

of your business, so the answer should be “Yes.” We deal with this in other white papers but if you are going to blog you will need to add blogging software to the site.

You can build a site in HTML and connect it to a WordPress blog page, or you can build the entire site in WordPress and include a blog page. It’s important to plan for this in the beginning so you can sync the look and feel of the blog to the main site. In other words, the transition from the main website (Home Page, About Us, etc.) to the blog page should be visually seamless.


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How often will information change on your website?

Many of our clients want to control their own destiny.

You can’t blame them. They don’t want to be connected to us by the hip for the life of the website (well, many of them like us so they don’t mind, and neither do we). They ask us for a site with a “Content Management System” (CMS). They don’t know what that means but they’ve heard about it and they want it. There are many CMS platforms out there, like WordPress, and there are also many home made versions. In other words, you will be using the CMS developed by the same company that developed your website. Often, you are still tied to them for the foreseeable future because, six months later you’ve forgotten everything you learned in the 4-hour training session on how to use the CMS. Hubspot recently developed a proprietary Content Optimization System that not only is responsive, but has CMS capabilities.

The top CMS platforms are:

WordPress

Joomla

Drupal. Other popular platforms include:

Expression Engine (we thought this one was too complex)

Text Pattern

Contao (TypOLight)

Silverstripe

Umbraco, and

Concrete5 to name a few. Here is a good article that details the strengths and weaknesses of each: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/10/top-10-content-management-systems/

http://hubspot.com/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/10/top-10-content-management-systems/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/10/top-10-content-management-systems/


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Will your visitors get past the home page in a few seconds?

If a visitor finds your home page (and that in itself is an uphill climb) and you have their attention for a few seconds, what are

the most important things they need to know about your company that will make them want to know more and to contact you for the next step? What IS the next step you want them to take? Nearly all websites should offer action steps or “Calls-to-Action.”

Okay, I’m here, what do you do?

How can you help me?

What should I do now? If they found your site through a Google search then they most likely typed in a question like – “How much does a new website cost?”

Keyword Optimization If your site is optimized for the keywords: “How much does a new website cost?” then it should show up in the search results, hopefully near the top. The search result will show a heading that comes from the page title and a short description below that comes from the META description (search engine optimization lingo). If the result looks relevant, they will click on the link and come to the home page. When they arrive, there needs to be text or a graphic right at the top that talks about website costs and offers a solution, even if it’s “Learn More,” and they fill out a form to download a paper. It’s a start to building a relationship.


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Is the “website content” written or does it need to be developed?

These are some very good questions

Who will develop the content?

Where does the content come from?

What internal resources are available to oversee the accuracy of the content? This is a very important item to know to determine website development costs. If you’re starting from scratch, do you have a brochure with text that can be logically transferred over to a web page? Can we take the text from your existing website as is or does it need to be tweaked? Do you have nothing at all, thereby requiring us to interview you or your staff and even your customers to develop a message that will attract new leads? These are important questions because the answers will give us an idea of the approximate time it will take us to develop your content.

If you have an existing website and just want a new look, chances are we’ll take a quick look through the text to see that it tells your story in an impactful way and is still relevant to your brand. It may just need some minor editing.

If you don’t have a website but you have a sales brochure or other written material, we can use that as a starting point. Again, it may require some rewriting and editing.

If you don’t have a website and you’ve never writing anything about your company we have a lot of work to do. We can often get the content directly from our clients but they don’t always have the time needed to work on it, so it may delay the project. A second method is to interview our client and his staff to compile a story about the company, the product or the service they sell.


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How about graphics?

Do you have a logo?

Do you need to show photographs of your products or staff? Do you need to show charts or stats? If so, can we find them from existing materials or do we need to hire a graphic designer/artist/illustrator and/or a photographer? This is the same process as collecting content. You may have an existing site with good graphics and photos and we can simply transfer them to the new site. You might also have a brochure or other sales material, or a catalog from which we can pull photos and graphic images (charts, diagrams, etc.). Finally, if you don’t have any photos or graphics we will start from scratch, taking photographs of people and/or products, often hiring a professional photographer. We might also look for stock photos but these don’t work as well as actual photographs. How many people have used the same smiling guy on the headset for their customer service page?


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Is the site“R e s p o n s i v e ?”

Responsiveness is a new catchword for websites.

With it you may pay more. Without it you lose leads who can’t read your entire web page on a tiny iPhone screen.

Responsive sites are typically built from scratch. They are designed to adjust to accommodate any of the over 200 different sized screens available today, from a wide screen desktop monitor to a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

Some website templates are automatically scalable... ...like Hubspot’s Content Optimization System, or some WordPress templates. Building a responsive site is highly recommended, unless you know that your customers only use a desktop.


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Would Video enhance your marketing message?

We believe (and Google confirms) that video is very important to have on your site these days.

Videos show up consistently at the top of the search results (it helps that Google owns YouTube).

People would rather watch a 1-minute video than read paragraphs of text. However, video can cost you a fortune, or it can cost you a lot less and the difference is not always that important, depending on the image you want to portray. In the end, a video will look like what it will look like depending on the resolution of the monitor of the person looking at it, so here you can sometimes go cheap. Video costs will also include setting up a YouTube channel to store your videos where they can be easily and more cost-effectively shared.


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Do you need a Social Media presence?

Social Media is becoming more and more important these days.

You may not think it applies to you: “You mean I need Twitter for my heating and AC business? I need to post stuff on Facebook? You’re kidding.” No, we’re not. The key is getting found and there’s no better way than for someone to share your content with others than through Social Media. If you already have these accounts set up that’s great, but if not you will need someone to do that for you and to brand them so they all look like they belong to the same company. Remember: while Social Media itself is “free,” it takes some dedicated manpower to be effective.


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Will you sell products or services through your website?

Often called an eCommerce site, these can be more costly than a regular site. They require a secure shopping cart module where customers can feel safe handing over their credit card number. These can vary from a full-blown,

customized back-end module that costs six figures, to adding “Pay Now” buttons to your page from your PayPal business account.

A shopping cart module requires higher monthly hosting fees for these extra features. Plus, take into consideration credit card processing fees. If you want eCommerce on your site you will need what is called a “Merchant Gateway,” that allows customers to use a credit card to pay for services. Authorize.net is a gateway that connects your eCommerce (Shopping Cart) site to your bank. Here are some eCommerce modules (not all inclusive):

Magento

OSCommerce

Opencart

PrestaShop

ZenCart


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Which technical issues need to be addressed?

Do you already have a domain – something-something.com? Or do we need to brainstorm on a name and then research the registry to see if it’s available?

What about hosting? What kind of hosting will your website require? If it’s simple; say, 10 pages, with no heavy graphics or downloads, you can get by with a hosting plan for under $100 a year. If you have more you may need to pay more.

What happens when a link breaks on the site or some moron breaks through and adds malicious code to your page that directs visitors to a “Buy land in Siberia,” site or worse?

Or, if your sales folks say, “Hey, we haven’t gotten any leads from our contact form in months.” Could it be because you moved your site to a new host who was cheaper but, unbeknownst to you, didn’t support your old CGI script form? Do you have the technical know-how to fix these problems?

These types of things happen all the time. It’s important to have SOMEONE who knows what they’re doing look at and test out your website every so often. Getting a quick response can be challenging, so it’s important to have technical support lined up from the beginning.


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Taking the next step...

You may be saying, “Wow, I didn’t realize there was so much involved. But, yes, I actually do want to have visitors FIND my website, and when they get there I want them to DO something that may turn them into a QUALIFIED LEAD down the road.” If so, you’re on the right track. If you call an agency or developer and, when you ask them what it will cost, you DON’T hear crickets chirping on the other end for at least 10 seconds because they don’t quite know how to answer your question without deep thought, HANG UP. You’re not going to get what you need from them. Cheap equals cheap or additional costs down the road. Cheap often equals no leads. Take a few minutes to answer the questions we addressed in this paper for yourself, and hope that you find a person on the other end of the phone who, after that 10 second silence, says, “Well, it depends. Let me ask you a few questions.” Have questions? Call 215-491-3448 or visit www.TheWalshGroup.com for more educational materials.

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